Tag: Dkk1

Sarah Millar and her team at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have exploited a known property of hair follicle stem cells to restart hair growth in laboratory animals.

The Wnt signaling pathway is an important regulator of hair follicle proliferation, but does not seem to be required for hair follicle survival. Wnt signaling in cells culminated in the activation of a protein called beta-catenin, which goes to the nucleus of the cell and causes changes in gene expression.

Millar and her colleagues disrupted Wnt signaling in laboratory animals by expressed an inhibitor called Dkk1 in hair follicles. Dkk1 expression prevented hair growth, and when the hair follicles were examined, they still had their stem cell populations, but these stem cells were dormant. Removal of Dkk1 resumed Wnt/beta-catenin signaling, and restored hair growth.

Interestingly, Millar’s group found Wnt activity in non-hairy regions of the skin, such as palms, soles of feet, and so on. Therefore, in order for Wnt signaling to induce hair growth, it must occur within specific cell types.

This work also has additional applications: skin tumors often show over-active beta-catenin. Removing beta-catenin could prevent the growth of skin tumors, just as removing beta-catenin in the skin of these mice prevented proliferation of any hair follicles. However, agents that can activate beta-cateinin in hair follicles could reactivate dormant hair follicles and induce new hair growth.

Finding ways to safely reactivating the Wnt pathway in particular cells in the skin is a major focus of Millar’s research group. Such work may lead to treatments for male pattern baldness.

A source of stem cells from the digestive tract can repair a type of inflammatory bowel disease when transplanted into mice has been identified by British and Danish scientists.

This work resulted from a collaboration between stem cell scientists at the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council/Cambridge Stem Cell Institute at Cambridge University, and the Biotech Research and Innovation Centre (BRIC) at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. This research paves the way for patient-specific regenerative therapies for inflammatory bowel diseases such as ulcerative colitis.

All tissues in out body probably contain a stem cell population of some sort, and these tissue-specific stem cells are responsible for the lifelong maintenance of these tissues, and, ultimately, organs. Organ-specific stem cells tend to be restricted in their differentiation abilities to the cell types within that organ. Therefore, stem cells from the digestive tract will tend to differentiate into cell types typically found in the digestive tract, and skin-based stem cells will usually form cell types found in the skin.

When this research team examined developing intestinal tissue in mouse fetuses, they discovered a stem cell population that differed from the adult stem cells that have already been described in the gastrointestinal tract. These new-identified cells actively divided and could be grown in the laboratory over a long period of time without terminally differentiating into adult cell types. When exposed to the right conditions, however, these cells could differentiate into mature intestinal tissue.

Could these cells be used to repair a damaged bowel? To address this question, this team transplanted these cells into mice that suffered from a type of inflammatory bowel disease, and within three hours the stem cells has attached to the damaged areas of the mouse intestine. integrated into the intestine, and contributed to the repair of the damaged tissue.

“We found that the cells formed a living plaster (British English for a bandage) over the damaged gut,” said Jim Jensen, a Wellcome Trust researcher and Lundbeck Foundation fellow, who led the study. “They seemed to response to the environment they had been placed in and matured accordingly to repair the damage. One of the risks of stem cell transplants like this is that the cells will continue to expand and form a tumor, but we didn’t see any evidence of that with this immature stem cell population from the gut.”

Because these cells were derived from fetal intestines, Jensen and his team sought to establish a new source of intestinal progenitor cells. Therefore, Jensen and others isolated cells with similar characteristics from both mice and humans, and made similar cells similar cells by reprogramming adult human cells in to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and growing them in the appropriate conditions. Because these cells grew into small spheres that consisted of intestinal tissue, they called these cells Fetal Enterospheres (FEnS).

Established cultures of FEnS expressed lower levels of Lgr5 than mature progenitors and grew in the presence of the Wnt antagonist Dkk1 (Dickkopf). New cultures can be induced to form mature intestinal organoids by exposure to the signaling molecule Wnt3a. Following transplantation in a model for colon injury, FEnS contributed to regeneration of the epithelial lining of the colon by forming epithelial crypt-like structures that expressed region-specific differentiation markers.

“We’ve identified a source of gut stem cells that can be easily expanded in the laboratory, which could have huge implications for treating human inflammatory bowel diseases. The next step will be to see whether the human cells behave in the same way in the mouse transplant system and then we can consider investigating their use in patients,” Jensen said.